Western travellers to the Caucasus, in J. Speake (ed.) The Literature of Travel and Exploration, 1, 199-202. 2003. Fitzroy Dearbon.

Mongols held suzerainty and Genoese Black Sea trading-posts were established when Dominican Johannes de Galonifontibus, Bishop of Nakhichevan from 1377 (Archbishop of Sultanieh from 1398), completed in 1404 an account of his oriental experiences. Enumerating the Caucasian peoples and languages, he perspicaciously demarcated Circassia (Zyquia sive Tarquasia), Abkhazia, Mingrelia and Georgia (J/Ioriania – the form Georgiania is known from the mid-13th century) as countries with separate languages. Constantinople's fall (1453) subsequently hampered communion with the West.

Travel restarted with 17th-century missionaries, whose medical and pedagogical expertise helped counterbalance Orthodox (or pagan) reservations. Dominican Prefects Dortelli D'Ascoli and Giovanni da Lucca (1630s) extended Giorgio Interiano's description of Circassia (and Abkhazia). Theatine proselytisers targeted Mingrelia/western Georgia (Capuchins the eastern provinces) – the Vatican's Fide Press further contributed by printing the first Georgian books (Chikobava/Vateishvili). Many, including mission-head Don Pietro Avitabile (1626-1638), recounted their experiences. Prefect to Mingrelia, Arcangelo Lamberti (resident 1633-1649), penned valuable observations on every aspect of Mingrelian life. Simultaneously, Don Christoforo de Castelli (living locally 1627/8-1654), composed not only De Iberia Orientalis Regni Eiusque Recentulis Bellis but two albums of sketches (over 500 survive) vividly depicting inter alia architecture and the dress of different Abkhazian, Mingrelian, Imeretian, and east Georgian social classes. Another Prefect to Mingrelia, Joseph Marie Zampi, a 23-year denizen from approximately 1645, contributed a third significant source in his description of Mingrelian religious practice. This he handed to Jean Chardin (1643-1713) in 1672. A French traveller who became English(!) ambassador in Holland, Chardin translated and incorporated it as a substantial part of his own description of a sometimes perilous journey through Transcaucasia (1672-3), which reflects Ottoman and Persian influence in western and eastern parts, respectively – a Turkish organized slave-trade flourished from various Mingrelian ports. Linguistically, Zampi revealingly observed that the ecclesiastical language, Georgian, was as difficult for even the Mingrelian priesthood to understand as Latin was for Italian peasants!

First to provide concrete language-examples was the illustrious (half-Abkhazian-half-)Turkish traveller, Evliya Çelebi (1611-82/3), who transcribed (1640s) precious words and phrases for Circassian, Abkhaz, their now extinct sister-tongue, Ubykh, Mingrelian and Georgian (Gippert). Latvian-born German, Johannes Anton Güldenstädt (1745-81), included more extensive materials from most of the Caucasian languages as part of his comprehensive survey of the entire Caucasus, undertaken between 1770 and 1773 at the behest of the Russian Academy. Another German, Jacob Reineggs (1744-93), while serving (from 1779) east Georgian monarch Erek’le II, having attracted Potemkin's attention became Russian Resident in Tiflis (Tbilisi), leaving historico-geographical and ethnographic writings for posthumous publication. Captain de Grailly de Foix, a French officer in the Russian military, wrote an eye-witness account of Count Todtleben's expedition to Georgia (1769-71), which allows glimpses of Russian attitudes shortly before Russo-(east) Georgian relations were formalized in the Treaty of Georgievsk (1783). Marie Félicité Brosset (1802-80), a mid-century French traveller to Transcaucasia again on behalf of the Russian Academy, published vast quantities of mainly philological work on Georgian (and Armenian).

Chardin had drawn the first panorama of Tiflis; the second appeared in the work of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708), French traveller/botanist, who stayed with missionaries in Tbilisi in 1701 on his scholarly tour of the Near East. Swiss antiquarian/geologist François Dubois de Montpéreux (1798-1850) and Polish-born German naturalist/ethnographer Gustav Radde (1831-1903), who helped Tbilisi's Caucasian Museum reopen (1867), also published volumes of scientific and general interest after travels (1831-4) or residence (1863-1903), respectively.

Focus shifted to political/humanitarian issues with the first Briton to step foot in Circassia, Scotsman David Urquhart (1805-77), social activist/sometime-diplomat, who designed Circassia's national flag. His brief sojourn in 1834 had profound, if atypical, consequences. Vehemently pro-Turkish, he championed Circassian opposition to Russia's dubious claims to their country and was indirectly responsible for two of the most important travel-books to emerge from 19th-century peregrinations in the Caucasus. James Stanislaus Bell, having arranged (1836) for The Vixen to run Russia's blockade of Circassia with a cargo of salt, saw the vessel illegally impounded – Lord Palmerston declined to demand restitution, setting a precedent for the insouciance towards unwarranted aggression against North Caucasians that the West has manifested ever since. With strengthened determination, Bell took up residence in Circassia (1837-9), accompanied for a year by Times correspondent, J. A. Longworth. Both published poignant journals relating the Circassian, Ubykh and Abkhazian mountaineers' heroic struggle to defend their independence against often wanton brutality, while giving sympathetic insights into a lifestyle that within 25 years was to vanish forever. The moral of Bell's and Longworth's intimate memoirs is summed up in Urquhart's stinging rebuke: "When she [England] proclaims herself the friend of the powerful and the ally of the aggressor, she ceases to have a situation among mankind, not because her fleets are disarmed, but because her character has sunk." Captain Edmund Spencer authored parallel accounts, and all these British travellers were branded "spies" by Russian/Soviet tradition. By contrast, Caucasia's first American guest, George Leighton Ditson, severely disappoints, questioning Spencer's (indeed all Englishmen's!) veracity and dedicating his book to Russia's Caucasian Viceroy, Prince Vorontsov.

French governess, Anna Drancy, became an unwilling visitor to the Daghestan of Shamil, guerrilla-leader in north-east Caucasia, where she observed village-life. After her release, she described her captivity (1854-5), which followed a raid that seized aristocratic Georgian hostages to be bargained for Shamil's eldest son. More conventional travel to these remote parts was undertaken afterRussia's final conquest (1864) and the flight to Ottoman lands of most North West (plus some North East) autochthons by Hon. John Abercromby, Sir Arthur Augustus Thurlow Cunynghame, and John Frederick Baddeley (1854-1940), whose trek encountered Ingush-Chechens.

Sport is represented by Douglas William Freshfield, conqueror of Elbrus, Europe's highest peak, and other Caucasian challenges in the 1860-80s, who produced wonderful evocations of the mountains and a peregrination from Europe's highest inhabited village (Ushguli in Svanetia) through Abkhazia; Freshfield, Mrs. Harvey and Britain's (thus far) sole consular representative to Abkhazia, William Gifford Palgrave, all allude to Abkhazia's desolation after the mass-exodus of its indigenous population. Sir Clive Phillipps-Wolley's journal of usually unsuccessful attempts to slaughter Svanetia's wildlife pales in comparison.

[Sir] John Oliver Wardrop's (1864-1948) post-university jaunt through Georgia (1887) led to not only a charmingly illustrated travel-book but a life-long love-affair with the country and its language, shared subsequently by his sister, Marjory Scott (1869-1909). Both translated important literary works, laying the foundation for UK Georgian studies. Sir John became HMG's representative (1918-21) to Independent Georgia (cf. Bechhofer), establishing the Wardrop Collection (Bodleian Library) and the Wardrop Scholarship in Marjory's memory.

US war-correspondent, Negley Farson, was perhaps the last (1929) to enjoy the freedom to travel across the range before Stalin sealed his native region to foreign eyes. His sensitive account cautions: "[The mountains] 'possess' you. Once you have felt the spell of the Caucasus you will never get over it."

Travel Writing

Abercromby, Hon. John, A Trip through the Eastern Caucasus, with a chapter on the languages of the country, 1889 Avitabile, Don Pietro, Relazione di Georgia, anni 1624-1638, 1650.

Baddeley, John Frederick, The Rugged Flanks of Caucasus, 2 vols, 1940 An engrossing and informative portrayal, with detailed maps and the author's own illustrations, of the north-central and north-eastern areas with their tribes. Baddeley also wrote the acclaimed Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (1908; reprinted 1999). A one-time correspondent in St. Petersburg, his opportunity to visit the Caucasus came as part of the late 19th-century quest to exploit Baku's and Grozny's oil.

Barbaro, Giosafat, Travels to Tana and Persia by Josafa (Giosafat) Barbaro and Ambrogio Contarini, translated from the Italian by William Thomas and S [i.e. E]. A. Roy, with an introduction by Lord Stanley of Alderley, 1873; reprinted 1963

Giosafat Barbaro (1413-1494) and Ambrogio Cantarini (?-1499) were two Venetian diplomats who recorded impressions of XVth-century Caucasia Bechhofer[-Roberts], Carl Eric, In Denikin's Russia and the Caucasus, 1919-1920, 1921

Bell, James Stanislaus, Journal of a Residence in Circassia During the Years 1837, 1838 and 1839, 2 vols, 1840 Bernoville, Raphael, La Souanétie libre, 1875

Chardin, Chevalier Jean, Voyages de Monsieur le Chevalier Chardin en Perse, et autres lieux de l’Orient, 3 vols, 1711; as A New and Accurate Description of Persia and other Eastern Nations, translated by Edmond Lloyd, 1724; abridged as The Travels of Sir John Chardin through Mingrelia and Georgia into Persia, 1777

Ellis, George, Memoir of a Map of the Countries Comprehended between the Black Sea and the Caspian; with an account of the Caucasian nations, and vocabularies of their languages, 1788 Farson, Negley, Caucasian Journey, 1951; as The Lost World of the Caucasus, 1988 Ferrand, N., Voyage de Crimée en Circassie: lettres édifiantes et curieuses des missions étrangères, 1820 Freshfield, Douglas William, Travels in the Central Caucasus and Bashan, including visits to Ararat and Tabreez and ascents of Kazbek and Elbruz, 1869 Freshfield, Douglas William, The Exploration of the Caucasus, 2 vols, 1896; 2nd edition, 1902

Taitbout de Marigny, Jacques Victor Edouard, Three Voyages in the Black Sea to the Coast of Circassia, 1837 Urquhart, David, Progress and Present Position of Russia in the East, 1836 Usher, John, A Journey from London to Persepolis; including Wanderings in...

Wilbraham, Capt. Richard, Travels in Trans-Caucasian Provinces of Russia, 1837 A soldier with an interest in Russian military matters. He moved in exalted circles, meeting Nicholas II during the latter's Caucasian tour.

Facsimiles of the first four printed books in Georgian (Georgian Alphabet with Prayers; Litany of Loreto; Georgian-Italian Dictionary in 1629, followed by Francisco-Maria Maggio's Georgian Grammar of 1643) are included, along with a detailed introduction in Georgian, English, and Russian de Peyssonel, Claude Charles, Traité sur le commerce de la Mer Noire, 2 vols, Paris, 1787

Gippert, Jost, The Caucasian language-material in Evliya Çelebi's "Travel book": a revision, in Caucasian Perspectives, edited by George Hewitt, 1992 Hunt, Sir John, and Brasher, Christopher, The Red Snows. An account of the British Caucasus Expedition 1958, London: Travel Book Club, 1960 An account of mountaineering in the Svanetia region at a time when the Caucasus was still not generally open to Western visitors by the leader of the team that conquered Everest in 1953 and the British Olympic steeplechase-laureate. It includes a history of Caucasian climbs. Mineral-deposits explain the snow's pigmentation.

Lang, David Marshall, Count Todtleben's expedition to Georgia 1769-1771 according to a French eyewitness, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, XIII.4, 878-907, 1954 Loewe, Dr. L., A Dictionary of the Circassian Language in two parts: English-Circassian-Turkish and Circassian-English-Turkish, Appendix to vol. VI of the Philological Society, 1854 A response to an invitation from the British Philological Society to fill in gaps left by Klaproth's studies. The sub-title adds: Containing All the Most Necessary Words for THE TRAVELLER, THE SOLDIER, AND THE SAILOR. The Turkish is written in Ottoman characters, and the Arabic script (with Roman phonetic transcription) is also employed to render the Circassian. Maclean, Sir Fitzroy, To Caucasus. The End of All the Earth, London: Jonathan Cape, 1976

An appealing late travelogue to Ossetia, Georgia and Daghestan from the distinguished diplomat and inveterate traveller, who authored Eastern Approaches (1949 and much reprinted).

An account of a journey undertaken with William Edward David Allen, author of A History of the Georgian People (1932, reprinted 1971) and (with Paul Muratoff) of Caucasian Battlefields (1953), in the company of the father of Ossetic philology, Vasilij Ivanovich Abaev (b. 1899).

Vixen, H. M. S. [Henry Headley Parish? or David Urquhart?], British Diplomacy Illustrated in the Affair of the "Vixen". Addressed to the commercial constituency of Great Britain by an old diplomatic servant, 2nd edition, Newcastle: Currie and Bowman, 1838